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Comment by ksynwa | Hacker News Reader

For me the strange and unproductive direction Windows is going towards in encapsulated in the right-click menu in the file manager (Explorer). 11 has a shiny new menu that shows up when you right click. But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before. Additional options from for example 7zip don't show up in it. You have to click "more options" at the bottom which them reveals the old menu. There is no benefit to the new menu except for the fact that it is aesthetically more "modern" to its detriment.

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This sort of thing has been a devolving disaster since the Settings App was included in Windows 8 as a partial replacement for the Control Panel. I'm not sure the current state of things, but as of the last time I used Windows, the sets of functionality remained only partially overlapping between the two different tools.

The partial overlap has been in this state now for years and years. I still have to access the control panel for network device control, sound control, and some of the advanced sharing settings. I thought it would be a short transition but now we just have crappy partial duplicates of settings and ui styles scattered around this half baked migration. When I open the disk volume management it's like I'm back on Windows 2000 for some reason.

Regular volume management can be done entirely within the Settings app. So can sound settings. There's probably an outlier that diskmgmt does better, I'm sure. But diskpart still exists, too. It could be that MSFT targets only the common scenarios and the fallback ends up being old utils/PowerShell at some point.

This was new in 2025, so it is still moving over.

As far as I know, to modify the audio Exclusive Mode settings and view jack information, you still need to use mmsys.cpl from the Control Panel. And I think many operations like converting MBR to GPT still require the Disk Management control panel.

You're correct, and those are likely all little-used in the grand scheme of Windows users (MBR -> GPT for certain).

Waving it away as little-used features is not an excuse, it's the entire reason things got this way. That's why we have layers upon layers of half baked UI with "only" the controls that "everyone" needs. Because those rationalizations are wrong and this is the result.

I would expect Microsoft to relegate little used features to CLI rather than figure out how to integrate them into the UX.

Depends if they want their OS to be easy to use with wide appeal like macOS, or a CLI nightmare like Arch.

And seeing as Windows is now a nightmare, and I am a technical person, I’ve moved everything to Linux.

Everything is still harder to get set up right on Linux, but it stays right. I’ve also found the LLM’s dramatically shorten the time required to configure things I don’t have experience with.

MS have abandoned their power users, and the power users (some of them at least), are abandoning MS. I keep Windows around in a VM for work purposes; never had a better setup! I’m in complete control of my PC again.

I have to use xattr -c on every "untrusted" binary in macOS just in order to run it. So much for easy to use with wide appeal...

Somehow macOS only has one System Settings app. (They did admittedly make a mess of it lately, but in an entirely different way than Windows.) And yes, they relegate a lot of advanced stuff to the Terminal.

> That's why we have layers upon layers of half baked UI with "only" the controls that "everyone" needs.

But this is the future. Layers over layers of abstraction. The main idea is to make the attacker give up.

Honestly I always hope that what I try to do, is still possible with the old Control Panel, since there I at least get understandable descriptions and can actually change things instead of the marketing speech and locked down settings in that abomination called "Settings app".

Oh but nowadays you have to access the old Control Panel only to access advanced options, like... setting the actions for lid close and power button, apparently.

It's still the same, more stuff got converted too the settings app, some stuff is still in the old control panel.

It's ridiculous how long this is taking really.

13 years... Longer than the time between Windows 2000 and Windows 8.

But Microsoft is a small business which just cannot afford to have two versions of interfaces for clearly distinct modes of interaction: touch and mouse-based. They had no other choice except trying to merge things together.

Apps need to adhere to some new conditions to contribute items to the Win 11 context menu. The 7-zip creator has been unable or unwilling to make these changes[1].

There are other open source projects which do display in the context menu, such as TortoiseGit and Notepad++. In fact there is a fork of 7-zip called NanaZip which supports the Win 11 context menu.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/1...

They even hide ‘New Folder’ now when clicking within a folder - sometimes.

It’s the most bizarrely unhelpful ‘helpful’ UX I’ve ever seen.

I’d be willing to bet that behind a change like this is a certain amount of data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently, and a stakeholder decision that this must mean that they should be demoted. And it’s data driven. Makes for a nice bullet point in a report. Most users don’t miss it, on stakeholders can tell themselves that those that you are a minority who don’t really matter for one reason or another.

And as technology moves from tool that provides value to be paid for to cultural experience to be farmed, aesthetic changes drive a sense of currency and progress more than utility -and take a greater place of focus (and we’re a long ways from a time with a respected UX class considering utility even if the larger teleology valued it).

> data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently [...] Most users don’t miss it

Um, I am very skeptical that Microsoft's KPIs have this level of alignment with actual user workflows.

Of course they do. It's all the telemetry that some people complain about.

I wonder how much overlap there is between people who disable telemetry and people who use the right mouse button in Explorer.

Without knowing exactly how far the common "debloat" Windows tools go, which every computer-toucher seems to recommend, I'd assume the overlap between "Users that disable, intentionally or otherwise, telemetry" and "Users that use 'Right-click -> More Options'" isn't quite a circle - but it is approaching one

I'm not denying the existence of intrusive telemetry, I'm saying their KPIs do not care whether they break your workflows?

You really should assume that Microsoft knows exactly what you do on their machine.

Where did I say they didn't?

They know _what_ you do. They don't know _why_ you do it.

> I’d be willing to bet that behind a change like this is a certain amount of data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently,

On a normal OS you have to change usual settings exactly once.

> data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently

This is literally the shitshow that's post-Ribbon Microsoft UX in a nutshell.

In the 90s, they designed a logical ontology, then mapped every item somewhere into that.

Post-Ribbon, they pulled whatever happened to be most-commonly used in, and then everything else got stuffed in a jumbled junk drawer (because who uses that?).

What seems to have been lost in the move from one to the other is anyone at Microsoft giving a goddamn 2 seconds of thought, minimum, to EVERY item in the OS.

And because that thought was never given, you get wildly broken edge cases and odd settings, simply because it wasn't anyone's job to make sure everything had a place.

Ribbonification (aka polish the 80% and fuck the 20%) isn't bad for users: it's bad because it lets Microsoft be lazy about organizing.

Nice to mention that this new menu takes ages to appear, on my computer I can wait 5s until it is rendered and I can finally click on more options...

That's funny because I was about to speculate that maybe the customized 7-zip options were removed as part of an API change to speed up the menu by getting rid of shell extensions.

Whoopsy!

I remember seeing some tech vlogger discovering that the lag was due to a bug where the fade-in animation of the menu not being played properly, and the menu just "appear" after the missing animation, leading to the feeling of sluggish interaction.

But that's not just a feeling, it's actual sluggish interaction. What's it doing a fade-in for, to build suspense?

If I remember rightly, "send to" is missing, even after clicking for more options. This was one of the first places where I felt the need to hit Windows 11 with a wrench, so I've had the old-style context menu back for years now.

The only thing keeps Windows 11 usable for me are these two mods..

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

https://github.com/open-shell/open-shell-menu/

They bring back the context menu and the old task bar, as well as the old start menu. It's like I never left Windows 10.

And I've switched to Linux Mint for all my systems except my laptop, which still has some hardware limitations under Linux.

I actually don't mind this at all. These days the norm seems to be to drop features just because it's more convenient. I think this hybrid approach is not bad at all: the new menu is more aesthetically pleasing and consistent from a UX perspective, and if you really need something that is not there yet you can always use the old menu.

For all its faults I think it's strange to criticize Microsoft for maintaining backwards compatibility.

The real problem is there's no setting to default to the classic menu, and you have to do regedit BS.

Isn’t the real problem that the new menu somehow can’t show the missing entries of the old one but with its new coat of paint? It’s all data, why can one of them not display the old data?

The Windows 11 default context menu uses a newer API (IExplorerCommand) compared the older method which involved screwing around with the registry, and having everything play nice.

Here's a MS blog post explaining why they want to move to IExplorerCommand: https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-cont...

Frankly, this just follows all the same problems that MS has had with since after W7. Their own APIs have a lot of warts and problems, but MS has not been able or willing to follow through on the migration required to actually move to a whole new API. This has shown up in their Windows GUI frameworks, it's the exact same problem with the Control Panel vs Settings, and here it is again.

I can sympathize with many of the stated goals/benefits, and I can understand the technical difficulties with transparently porting registry craziness into their new framework, and infact I applaud that their fallback is "perfect" - it is just the old context menu. I just wish there was a setting toggle to set the default.

> is more aesthetically pleasing and consistent from a UX perspective,

It is a combination of a vertical and orizontal menu. Something like Edge with horizontal and vertical tabs in the same window

> consistent from a UX perspective

It changes its height dynamically by state of each shell extensions. how come it is consistent from a UX perspective.

You can disable the new right click menu with one registry tweak: https://www.elevenforum.com/t/disable-show-more-options-cont...

It comes back, or at least it did for me. Holding shift when rightclicking will get you to the menu you want reliably tho. Vetter yet, if at all an option, swithc to linux or start putting pressure internal to drive a switch. There's nothing left in windows but network effects, but the loss in productivity due to a switch to linux is readily be offset by not being hobbled by W11 anymore. Invest 1 unit of time now to recoup 1 unit of time per month ad infinitum.

Yeah first thing I did. The new one lacks a lot of stuff I use a lot and basically makes all that two clicks. Tedious.

> except for the fact that it is aesthetically more "modern" to its detriment.

And also much, much slower.

The old context menu is nearly instant even when stuffed with extensions. When the new one is full of extensions, it takes full seconds to load the entire menu. You get a partial load, then the extensions pop in (and of course pushes elements down/up so now you misclick).

I don't even know how anyone could experience it in testing and allow it to go live in the state that its in. Its like no one even looked at it.

The old one had a similar problem depending on the extensions, to be fair

The old context menu can get slow as hell too, there have been third party tools to manage it for ages, like https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

Windows 10/11 UX is very slow in general. Combined with Intel mobile CPUs of the last few years running much hotter compared to Apple M models makes for terrible laptops. Lots of fan noise with a sluggish UI doesn't feel anywhere near a Macbook Air, even an M1. While full power raw CPU performance may actually be very close and the Intel based laptops typically cheaper.

> Windows 10/11 UX is very slow in general.

Drawing gray rectangles is a very resource intensive operation. It is a wonder how a Pentium was able to draw also a 3D border around the rectangle.

There were some sick people who, in 4 Megs of RAM were also letting you choose colors while presenting a Win10/11 interface (Apollo) but those were some heretics.

Indeed. I've heard Elon is upgrading his Colossus computer just to experience dragging grey rectangles seamlessly.

Exactly. This is the best example of what Windows 11 is. I have the feeling that Microsoft is trying to bring change at the same time that it cannot, and has to come up with workarounds like this one. This would explain the Settings panel like someone mentioned in this thread. Another thing that I dislike (with all due respect to developers of React) is this migration to React and Reactish behavior of Windows. We have been fine with Win32 after so many years. Why change that, other than wanting to stay "relevant" or "modern"? Just my opinion.

> But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before

It's not, which is the point. They're trying to get people off the old way of extending the shell. If they just wanted to reskin the right click menu to look "modern" they could have done that.

https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-cont...

Right, that’s the strange part. I originally thought that the split was caused by the old shell APIs requiring honest-to-goodness HMENUs with all that implies, but File Pilot[1] does have reskin the old menu with some success so evidently that’s not completely impossible.

[1] https://filepilot.tech/

> There is no benefit to the new menu

I personally don't like the new menu and disabled it with some tweak program, but the new menu as the benefit of hiding dozens of context menu items any random app barfs into it (e.g. Google Drive adds 6! items to the root context menu). It would be better if Windows natively supported demoting/pinning items to the unexpanded context menu.

You can also just directly registry hack to force always-more-options: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1cv8xt3/how_ca...

God ! For a long time, the cut copy paste icons had no text !

I mean, c'mon MS, after so many years in the industry, surely you must know that having text below icons is how most users use the functions.

Heck, I am a seasoned developer, live and breathe computers and software. I too was confused at times with that.

Only recently did they add the text to the icons.

Also,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2287432/...

It’s not even that. If you do it often enough sometimes the old (vastly more useful) menu shows up and sometimes it’s the new menu. There is no rhyme or reason.

Apps not showing up in the new menu is because the app has not updated to support the new menu. I am seeing third party apps in my Windows 11 right click menu such as WinMerge.

You mean like Microsoft's own apps? Like... all of them?

Someone wrote it like it's a Windows 11 issue though. But clearly it's a developer choice to support the new menu or not because some apps are clearly supporting it just fine.

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